News

Hadrien Kurkjian, a collaborator of Yvan Castin and Alice Sinatra at the ENS Paris, was awarded a Pegasus fellowship, and will join TQC for three years.

Nick Van den Broeck, ph.d. student in our research group, has won the young speaker's contest of the Dutch Physical Society. The finals took place during the "Fysica 2015" meeting in Eindhoven, where this Belgian beat our northern neighbors. He presented research on the optical properties of thin layers of metallic hydrogen, an intriguing new allotrope of hydrogen. Research on metallic hydrogen takes place in collaboration with prof. Isaac F. Silvera at Harvard University, who is the first to have succeeded in dissociating molecular hydrogen in a diamond anvil cell via pulsed laser heating at high pressures. Our theoretical work attempts to link the changes in reflectance and transmittance due to the metallization process.

This year, the applications for FWO fellowships were very fruitful for TQC. A "Pegasus Marie Curie Fellowship" was granted to dr. Onur Rifat Umucalilar, which he will use to research the behaviour of strongly correlated photons in the presence of artificial gauge fields. Starting next academic year, dr. Jeroen Devreese will delve into the properties of ultracold fermi gases in the presence of spin-orbit coupling as an FWO post-doctoral researcher. Finally, the FWO aspirant fellowship of Enya Vermeyen was renewed; she is researching itinerant ferromagnetism in ultracold fermi gases. We are very glad the FWO keeps investing in fundamental scientific research in Flanders, despite the economic crisis.